Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Stat Health Services built the first Stat Doctors website in 2010 by using physical servers. The vision of its founder, emergency room doctor and administrator Alan Roga, was to provide a proprietary e-health service technology for patients who wish to avoid emergency room visits.

“We offer virtual house calls for minor medical conditions by linking patients with board-certified emergency room physicians through audio and video conferencing 24 hours a day from anywhere,” says Roga, who now serves as Chief Executive Officer at Stat Health Services. “However, our server-based system had outages that delayed patient care, and it couldn’t scale easily to meet growing demand.”

In August 2011, the company teamed up with Business & Decision, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to engineer its system to use Windows Azure Cloud Services. “We concluded that Windows Azure would provide easier system management and on-demand scalability,” says Roga. “We saw Microsoft as a trustworthy partner with a technological vision that aligned with the business needs of Stat Health Services.”

The cloud-based system saw its first patient in March 2012. “Our initial promise was to ensure that all patients would be seen within 30 minutes,” says Roga. “With Windows Azure, our average time has been only eight minutes from the time a patient logs on to the time they see a doctor, and we have had no service outages.”

Because of the success of the Windows Azure Solution, Stat Health Services decided to adopt other Microsoft cloud services. “Our experience with Windows Azure was so exceptional that we decided to move our email and collaboration systems to Microsoft Office 365 and our customer management system to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online,” says Roga. “So not only is our product in the cloud, but our enterprise applications as well.”

With a move to cloud computing, Stat Health Services avoided a $170,000 initial investment in hardware and software. The company saved more than $3,000 per month by eliminating third-party tools from its original system and has realized significant healthcare savings for its business customers. One customer, Scottsdale Healthcare, calculated that Stat Doctors saved it nearly $115,000 in 2011.

“Our vision is to be the national leader in patient-centered e-healthcare, and our primary goal is to amaze our patients,” says Roga. “We want them to say ‘I can't believe how great this was, and I can't wait to use it again.’ Using Microsoft as our cloud services delivery system provides us with a level of trust and reliability that makes this possible.”